First-Year Seminars (FYS) are among the high-impact practices described by AAC&U. We studied the long-standing First-Year Seminar Program at our public research university for the ways in which writing assignments--individualized for each seminar--help faculty and students achieve program objectives in critical and analytical thinking, the…

Focus group interviewing is widely used by academic and applied researchers. Given the popularity and strengths of this method, it is surprising how rarely focus group interviewing is taught in the undergraduate classroom and how few resources exist to support instructors who wish to train students to use this technique. This article fills the gap…

Agile development has received increasing interest both in industry and academia due to its benefits in developing software quickly, meeting customer needs, and keeping pace with the rapidly changing requirements. However, agile practices and scrum in particular have been mainly tested in mid- to large-size projects. In this paper, we present…

This dissertation identified the practices utilized by three exemplary instructors in a Northern California Community College. The case study approach was the method of choice based on the questions that this study sought to answer. The methodology included interviews, focus group sessions, classroom observations and document review. Eight…

The continued downward spiral of enrollment in physical sciences in the USA and Europe has science educators concerned on both sides of the Atlantic. Physics has been particularly hard-hit, with the percentage of students choosing to major in the subject at the lowest level in decades. University physics has a reputation as a difficult, abstract…

This study describes the perceived influence of group-level HIV interventions on persons living with HIV in Los Angeles, California. Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and developed by a broad range of community organizations, group-level interventions ranged from small skills-building workshops to large educational forums…

The purpose of this document is to identify the features of four successful collaborative partnerships between state education agencies (SEAs) and parent training and information centers (PTIs) and describe how these collaborative partnerships are improving SEA outcomes on Indicator B8 of the state performance plans (SPPs)--i.e., "Percent of…